This invention relates, in general, to a distributed computing environment, and in particular, to managing the accessing and modifying of data located in a global repository of the distributed computing environment.
Distributed systems are highly-available, scalable systems that are utilized in various situations, including those situations that require a high-throughput of work or continuous or nearly continuous availability of the system.
Typically, clients of a distributed system desire access to and modification of data residing in a global repository accessible by one or more servers of the system. In order to prevent corruption of the data, techniques are needed to manage the access and modification of the data.
One previous technique includes locally caching the data, so that clients have access to the data. This often results in complex and error prone data caching validation techniques, which can hinder performance of the repository, if the data access does not follow data locality patterns.
In a further example, the data is always accessed at the server and brought over the network. This allows the user to take advantage of the search engine of the server, but there is a high performance price to be paid.
Based on the foregoing, a need still exists for a capability that facilitates efficient access and modification of data stored in remote repositories.
The shortcomings of the prior art are overcome and additional advantages are provided through the provision of a method of modifying stored tables of a client-server environment. The method includes, for instance, providing, in local memory of a node of the client-server environment, a local table comprising at least a portion of a global table concurrently accessible by a plurality of users of the client-server environment, wherein the local table is manipulatable via database functions, as if it was a global table; modifying the local table; and atomically merging at least a portion of the modified local table with the global table, wherein the merging is performed without user locking of the global table.
System and computer program products corresponding to the above-summarized methods are also described and claimed herein.
Advantageously, data access and modification is facilitated by an efficient and highly functional capability of the present invention.
Additional features and advantages are realized through the techniques of the present invention. Other embodiments and aspects of the invention are described in detail herein and are considered a part of the claimed invention.